322 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXVIII. No. 715 



or insufficient data. Many times you will 

 fervently wish that you had become more 

 thoroughly familiar with the character- 

 istics of this or that chemical, or with 

 standard practise in machine design, fac- 

 tory construction, the iron and steel in- 

 dustry, boiler construction, engines and a 

 thousand and one things that could not 

 possibly all be crowded into a college 

 course of reasonable length. I have had 

 under my direction or in my employ or 

 associated with me quite a large number of 

 engineers, chemical engineers, engineering 

 chemists, industrial chemists, industrial 

 engineers, draftsmen, chemical experts, 

 manufacturing chemists and just plain 

 chemists, besides one or two of those chem- 

 ists who would have graduated in June 

 only their eyes gave out about the first of 

 February. These men have been gradu- 

 ates of European universities, including 

 Berlin, Luxembourg and Upsala ; American 

 universities, including Cornell, Harvard, 

 Princeton, Syracuse, Lafayette, Vermont 

 and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 

 and the Rensselaer Polytechnic; others of 

 the men, among them some of the most 

 efficient in chemical manufacture, have had 

 no university training whatever, but have 

 entered chemical works as boys and ob- 

 tained their training there. 



I have endeavored to note the merits and 

 deficiencies of all these men as well as my 

 own shortcomings, or lack of preparation, 

 and want to give you to-night, first, a few 

 ii the lines along which I think you would 

 do well to work in your chemical prepara- 

 tion, and, second, sketch a few of the in- 

 dustries which show a good future for the 

 chemist and a few of the problems that 

 confront him there. 



The selection of the subjects to be con- 

 sidered will be a purely arbitrary one. It 

 will not at all be based on their compara- 

 tive importance or extent, but will be deter- 



mined solely by whether I happen to have 

 first-hand knowledge regarding them. 



This decision and restriction require no 

 little firmness of mind. It shuts me out 

 of nearly the whole field of modern chem- 

 ical research and discovery. It would be 

 such a delight to expatiate on radium and 

 its emanations and allies, or the possible 

 degradation of copper into lithium, or the 

 fulfillment of our long hope of fixing 

 atmospheric nitrogen, or the marvelous de- 

 velopments in electric furnace work and 

 manufacture of alloys, or the changes ta- 

 king place in the iron and steel industry, 

 the explosives industry and the cement in- 

 dustry, or any other branch of chemical 

 industry which has been undergoing revo- 

 lutionary changes, regarding which I may 

 have a smattering of information. But it 

 is amazing how small and how prosaic 

 one's information is, when it is restricted 

 to those matters of which he has definite 

 first-hand information. 



Taking up now the deficiencies in knowl- 

 edge or training which the young graduate 

 chemist shows when he meets his first em- 

 ployer, the most striking one to my mind 

 is his ignorance of the comparative com- 

 mercial importance of chemicals; the com- 

 parative extent of their manufacture and 

 sale. "When you study chemistry as a sci- 

 ence solely this question of commercial im- 

 portance does not and should not arise. 

 Indium should receive as much attention 

 as aluminum or lead. The mere fact that 

 one is bought and sold while the other 

 isn't has no bearing whatever on their re- 

 lation to the science of chemistry. And 

 further, I do not want to be understood as 

 indicating that chemistry should be taught 

 in any other way than as a science. The 

 business of the student during his four 

 years here is to learn the fundamental 

 principles underlying the various branches 

 of chemistry, acquire a certain familiarity 

 with its representative elements and com- 



